Russia invades Ukraine. The United States responds with threats of unspecific “costs” Moscow will incur if it doesn’t reverse course. We offer Putin-esque photos of Obama in almost comically aggressive postures on a telephone call with the Russian leader. We threaten not to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin to future summits of global big shots. NATO dispatches some of its elite corps of press release writers to offer up limp admonitions. And the U.S. president’s critics are left wondering aloud: Is this the weakest American president since Jimmy Carter? Or is it unfair to Carter to include him in that question? House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers illustrated the critique, suggesting that “Putin is playing chess” while “we’re playing marbles.”

Or alternatively, in the view of the president’s defenders, perhaps Barack Obama is just doing as much as a responsible president, respectful of his mandate and the current limitations on American power, can do.

The situation in Crimea is, of course, not the only factor in raising questions about the nature of contemporary American leadership. Looking around the world today we see as daunting an array of global crises and brewing problems as we have seen at any one time in recent history: Ukraine, Syria, Venezuela, Iran, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, Israel-Palestine, North Korea, China-Japan, Thailand, Burma, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria, Mali, economic problems in faltering big emerging powers, and the climate crisis. It seems the lid has come off the pot worldwide. It forces a bigger question: Is this an aberrant moment or the beginning of a trend? Are the mechanisms we have for helping to stabilize volatile situations failing? Did they ever work well enough? And what does this have to do with the current crop of governments of the world’s most powerful nations, notably the United States? Are their domestic problems and political predilections and the character of their leaders part of the problem? Is there any way they can become part of the solution?

Each crisis cited above, of course, is its own complex situation. In the case of Ukraine, the United States has made diplomatic efforts behind the scenes to address it. It is good to hear that energetic and creative Secretary of State John Kerry is flying to Kiev to meet with the interim government. Further, what Russia does in its near abroad is certainly not solely the concern of the United States. The European Union and the world’s other powers have been equally ineffective or inert or both, thus persuading Putin that he could act with impunity while violating the sovereignty of an important nation. And beyond economic and political wrist-slaps, it is hard to know what the West can do without escalating the situation. Certainly, the current situation in Ukraine echoes what happened in Georgia when Russia effectively snapped up the separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and the United States, then under President George W. Bush, also did nothing but watch and vigorously complain. (It is worth noting that subsequent Russian provocations have effectively gone unchallenged by the Obama administration.)

But, even while acknowledging all that, we can be relatively certain that one of the reasons that Putin has taken the action he has — why he has felt free to order troops into Crimea and indeed why he has felt so free to meddle in the affairs of Ukraine since the beginning of the current crisis — is because he has felt there would be no consequences — at least none serious enough to dissuade him.

This is the message that America’s recent foreign-policy actions — or rather its relative inaction and fecklessness — from Syria to the Central Africa Republic, from Egypt to Anbar province, from the East China Sea to the Black Sea, have helped to send. We have gone from Pax Americana to Lox Americana.

Our policy time and time again has effectively been to just lie there like a fish.

The world knows this now. They saw Obama hesitate to act in Syria years ago when his advisers were calling for it and he could have made a difference. They saw him blink when Syria crossed the red line he had drawn not once but 12 times. They saw him blink again when he almost took the most limited of military actions against Bashar Assad’s regime, his team supported it, the ships were in place, and he punted. They have even seen, thanks to recent reporting by David Sanger at The New York Times, that when the NSA gave him cyber-options to use against the Syrians — the lightest and theoretically most risk-free of all light-footprint options — he refused to act.

When asked about Syria on “Meet the Press,” National Security Adviser Susan Rice accurately characterized what has happened there as “horrific” and then posed a classic false choice, arguing, “But if the alternative here is to intervene with American boots on the ground, as some have argued, I think that the judgment the United States has made and the president of the United States has made is that is not in the United States’ interests.” Because, of course, that is not the only choice, as the decision-non-decision to launch cruise missiles in August clearly demonstrated. And other available steps — such as providing faster and more meaningful support for elements of the opposition we supported, a stronger, better-funded, more proactive humanitarian response, movement in the International Criminal Court to prosecute Assad, and tougher pressure on Russia and Iran to stop supporting Assad — were also not taken. Assad is, per the assessment of Obama’s own intelligence chief, James Clapper, stronger today (thanks to our chemical weapons deal) than he was before it. (For a good take on this, see Richard Cohen’s piece “Susan Rice and the Retreat of American Power”: http://wapo.st/1hPbWAg)

Russia was there watching America on Syria and elsewhere. Putin was watching.

They saw that when then-President Mohammed Morsi abused the Egyptian people and the promise of democracy in that country, this administration refused to put meaningful pressure on him. But when the people of Egypt spoke and ousted a man who abused the trust they had placed in him — as is the inalienable right of any people in the view of the founding fathers of the United States — we also couldn’t make up our mind on how to treat the successor regime. Indeed, not only did we hesitate (thus alienating not only a key ally but also virtually every other reliable ally we have in the region), but we even saw two inconsistent policies on Egypt emerge — one from the State Department and Secretary Kerry that showed a practical willingness to work with the government of Egypt’s army chief, Field Marshal Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and one from the White House revealing only more recalcitrance and inaction.

When China sentences scholars to prison, the White House response is to tweet its “deep disappointment.” When Putin meddled in Ukraine, our first response was to issue weak counterstatements. When the Ukrainian regime killed its own people, we revoked their visas. When Putin massed troops on the border, Obama urged him not to act, lest there be those “costs” — a word that sent the unmistakable message that the worst Putin would have to contend with would be possible sanctions or more visa-war. (Obama also released a picture of himself posing forcefully at his Oval Office desk while talking to Putin. His foot was even up on the desk.) More recently we bandied about the threat of kicking Russia out of the G8 — a group in which it didn’t belong in the first place, one whose role has been marginalized somewhat since the financial crisis, and one the Russians can clearly live without. A White House press call on Sunday included a list of possible economic penalties being considered, but all were on the drawing board, many were pinpricks at best, and none seemed likely to alter the situation.

Just last week, in a corner of the world that has produced both U.S. and Russian foreign-policy failures, Afghanistan, when the regime of Hamid Karzai continued behaving as recklessly as it has all along, the White House followed another classic pattern — warning that if the Afghan regime didn’t go along with U.S. policy, then we were done, we’d just walk away. Disengaging after failure as a means of persuasion is a tactic the president has employed with the U.S. Congress time and time again, and it is now the policy driver likely to write the last chapter in America’s longest war. Obama has unnecessarily deepened America’s involvement in that war, in my view. But having no presence there, seeking no effective alternative to Karzai, going to the zero option would be a disaster — especially because of the degree to which it would inhibit our ability to keep an eye on terrorist threats in the region and, more worrisome, Pakistan’s nuclear program.

Make no mistake, the administration of George W. Bush often and with devastating consequences went too far. It launched a catastrophic war in Iraq. He therefore owns a considerable share of the responsibility for America’s loss of appetite for sound, active, sometimes forceful, foreign policy. But this president is the man who has since taken us too far in the opposite direction. He has not only sent the message that America won’t launch reckless foreign wars — which is why he was elected - but he has gone further and seemingly turned the false choice outlined by Rice into the foundations of a doctrine. We have gone from Bush’s “us versus them” to “all or nothing” — well, to be fair, to “too much or not enough.” America is leaning away from the tough questions, leaning away not only from use of force (the last resort), but credible threats of force, from active use of sanctions and real political pressure, from mobilizing the international community effectively to support such efforts, from having clear policies, from making tough choices. And while we may even appreciate a reflective president who is not prone to rash moves, we need to be open to the idea that it is possible to go too far in the direction of reflexive passivity.

It is not terribly useful to get into simplistic discussions about whether we are isolationist or not, though the fact that these questions are being raised these days says something. Kerry was right last week to call out Congress on its tendencies in this direction. But doesn’t this White House now own some of that opprobrium given that, for example, those in its administration first concluded that taking action against Syria was the right thing to do and then deferred to that isolationist-laden legislature knowing full well that doing so would likely mean no action would be taken at all.

The wise Harvard international relations scholar Joseph Nye has argued that the Obama administration has been actively engaged worldwide and that we are therefore not taking an isolationist turn. But here again, unilateralist and isolationist are not the only options. Almost all presidencies operate in the shades of gray in between. Shifting a few notches toward waiting longer to act, acting less forcefully, and sending a signal that we are more rather than less reluctant to actively work to mobilize international opinion on our behalf opens the door to adventurism and abuse by the world’s bad actors and places doubt in the minds of our friends and allies.

No sane person would advocate going to war with Russia over Crimea. But a very sane individual, NATO’s former supreme allied commander, retired Adm. James Stavridis, points to the steps NATO should publicly be taking to add clout to whatever diplomatic steps America undertakes. Such efforts, showing NATO unity and purpose, would have the effect of at least limiting what Putin might seek to do and of making him think. Further, we could be undertaking public sanctions against Putin in the U.N. Security Council instead of tiptoeing around him, seeking emissaries that would do precious little but ultimately participate in the negotiations Putin wants — to redraw the borders in the region, ensuring Russian access to key Black Sea ports. We could be making public plans to help use our new energy resources to help systematically reduce European dependency on Russian oil and gas, specifying just what meaningful costs there would be for Putin and letting him know that there are real red lines that must be respected, thereby making him believe that simply seizing an entire European country is simply not going to be tolerated in the 21st century by the members of the Atlantic alliance. Sometimes mobilizing troops and shifting military assets helps freeze an enemy in his tracks and sends a useful message. Surely, at any rate, Stavridis meant do something more than the flaccid press release issued by NATO after its meetings on this crisis this weekend.

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